MLK: Just a dude

By T.W. Burger

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be 97 this year if some pinhead hadn’t shot him. He would perhaps be gone frail and a little dotty. Thinking back on his arc as firebrand and martyr, which is frankly hard to imagine.

Those of us who were around in his day remember him differently than younger folks do.

While he was alive he was, depending on where you stood, a visionary, a man of God who held his country’s collective feet to the fire of its own founding documents or a royal pain in the butt and a threat to the (white) American way of life. Many saw him as the devil himself.

Since his assassination 58 years ago today, on April 4, 1968, he has undergone a sort of apotheosis and elevation almost to a kind of deity. That’s too bad.

What was remarkable about King is that he was, in the end, an ordinary man who carried out extraordinary things. His death by an assassin’s bullet was unusual only in that he was in the forefront of the national awareness when it happened.

The Ku Klux Klan and any number of groups and individuals scattered fear and death across the landscape in those years, indeed, for decades beforehand.

One of the most heinous Klan murders happened 15 minutes from the house where I grew up in Athens, Ga. I was 15. It was in the summer of 1964, just nine days after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The victim was Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn of the Army Reserve, and a Washington D.C.-area educator, husband and father.

He and two colleagues were on their way back from a Reserve event at Fort Benning, Ga., when three KKK members pulled up next to the out-of-state car and gave Penn blasts from a pair of 12-gauge shotguns, blowing off the back of his head.

That happened at home, MY home. This wasn’t a grim photo of a lynching in the rural South. This was now.

People I didn’t know, but knew by sight, had done this. The world looked just like it always had. People went about their business, shopped for groceries and did laundry. Adults talked about it in hushed tones, some fearful, too many gleeful. A few kids at school joked about it. A good start, they said.

Years later, one of the Klansmen involved in that murder, though not one of those in the car, owned a grubby little cafe across from where I worked the night shift at a print shop.

I used to go there for coffee and watch him. If it was me the way I am now, after nearly 40 years as a reporter, I’d have asked him what he was thinking that night, what they thought they’d achieve. But I was 19 or 20 then and afraid.

It was a different time. It is almost a different country, though there are those trying to take us back there.

I mean in the sense of “Whites Only” signs over water fountains, and public rest rooms labeled “Men,” “Women” and “Colored.”

It wasn’t all that long ago. I saw it, as we’d say down home, “my own self.”

Fast forward a little more than 60 years. Things are different. Not perfect but different. Change has come to America, as President Obama said in his acceptance speech, if at a glacial pace. It wasn’t fanaticism we saw on those faces in Chicago’s Grant Park that election night, despite fearful comments to that effect. Of course, the current administration seems to try to backpedal us back to the early 50s or earlier, but in my heart of hearts, I believe that segment of our population waited way too long to turn things back in that direction.

To be sure, there were and are fanatics on all sides, some of whom would have deified Obama and some of whom would have gladly put him in his grave rather than see him succeed.

The light in those faces late on that Election Night was not the deification of Obama, but that of people who have for centuries stood out in the cold of our nation’s further reaches, allowed only to look in the windows and dream. On Nov. 4, 2008, when Obama was chosen, they suddenly saw the door to that house open and a hand beckon them to come in.

Yes, there is still racial hatred and violence. We see it almost every day. At this writing, we see it in the White House and Congress.

But I can tell you that in 1963, those stories would likely have never made even the local news outside of a one-inch police blotter entry if that.

Even if they had, nobody would have investigated with any enthusiasm.

Back then, it would have been a thing whispered in bars and in sitting rooms. Some might even have called it a shame.

We can only guess as to what Dr. King’s take would be on the movement he helped spark.

On the one hand, the same nation that once enslaved African Americans finally elected one to its highest office. And Congress today has more women and non-white members than it ever has: The Congress is beginning to look like America.

On the other, well. Look deep into your own heart. What do you see?

(Note: All four of the Klansmen that killed Lemuel Penn are now dead. One of the triggermen was shot in the chest—with a shotgun, ironically—by a man with whom he had been arguing.

The last time I drove by that little cafe, which had been closed for years, it had become a church.)